As I wrote in my post last week, I have been playing a bit with how to back up to Amazon S3 on Ubuntu. The simplest method of doing so is to use Duplicity, which have built-in support for backing up to a S3 bucket. That means that the only thing you have to do is to write a backup-script and set it to run whenever you feel like it.
Setting up the backup, I took a lot of inspiration from a blog post at cenolan.com and a blog post by Tim McCormack. Actually, “a lot of inspiration” may be an understatement, as I simply followed their lead. Read their posts for a thorough how-to. A single missing piece of information from both of their posts is that your S3 bucket may be placed in Amazon’s european datacenter, in which case you need to apply the following options to duplicity when running it:
--s3-european-buckets --s3-use-new-style
Besides adding these options, I did little to modify the work of cenolan.com. All credit for the modified backup.sh and backdown.sh goes to him.
Another way to back up to Amazon S3 is to mount it as a FUSE file system, and encrypt the data while rsync’ing it to the file system. That is how I want to set up backup for my laptop, for example. It eases restore and selection of exactly what files to backup (and backdown). How to set up that solution is going to be the subject of another blog post.
Posted in Software, Web | April 28th, 2009 |
I have just uploaded a new version of the user authentication library, pc_user. It does not contain major changes – only a security improvement which could have resulted in a SQL injection attack if the parameters given to the library was not cleaned prior to passing it to the library. The new release fixes this issue.
The new release, 1.1.
Posted in Development, Software, Web | April 19th, 2009 |
Finally.
After months of waiting on the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency to make their final decision on who is going to administer the .dk TLD, they finally announced that it is not going to be dotDK afterall. As it turned out, they were unable to gain the needed support from the Danish Internet community to be allowed the responsibility. Instead, DK-Hostmaster and DIFO is going to continue the administration.
I can only support this decision – in my mind, it never seemed to be a terribly good idea to break the centralized control with the TLD and use a shared registry. It is nice to always know where the .dk domains are administered from (especially when you need to make changes to them). My only hope is that DK-Hostmaster is going to implement some of the nice suggestions that have been put forward during the last months (like DNSSEC and a better administration interface).
Source: Version2 (Danish)
Posted in Technology, Web | November 25th, 2008 |
Via Miia Ranta’s Blog I discovered that Adobe launched a Flash Linux plugin for the x64 architecture. The fastest way to install it on a Ubuntu 8.10 system is to download the package flashplugin-nonfree – 10.0.12.36ubuntu2~ppa1 from Kees Cook’s PPA. But if installing it, be warned that there is no guarantee that the plugin works. Also, before installing the package, remove the package nspluginwrapper by doing
sudo apt-get remove nspluginwrapper
Though there is no guarantee that the plugin works as expected (it is an alpha prerelease version afterall), it seems to work perfect for me. It has made it possible for me to watch the full episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Yay!
Posted in Bits, Software, Technology, Web | November 17th, 2008 |
What should not have happened happened anyway. The dedicated server hoster I had signed up with was not as reliable and serious as I thought. So I had to move to another server (which took two weeks to set up, damn). All this caused the blog to be down for a long time, and a CHARSET problem did not make matters better. Anyhow, the blog is up and running again.
The new server is hosted by hetzner.de, by the way.
Posted in Me, Web | May 21st, 2008 |